Photo of the Month

Been very busy lately and my blog posts have suffered. Much of my spare time has been taken up with a book I have been working on, more info at my John Flynn Blog.
So here is my photo of the month for April. The photo was inspired by the winning photo at Sea Lake’s Harvest Festival. I entered four photographs, two won prizes and I sold one, so was quite pleased. After visiting the festival we decided to have a look at Lake Tyrrell, a large salt lake not far out of town. Instantly I saw this photo. I sent my son out into the very shallow and salty water and asked him to walk slowly toward me. I took a number of shots and after choosing the most suitable edited out the fine horizon line each side of the image using content aware fill in Photoshop CS5.

This a composite of 6 x 21 megapixel images stitched together in Photoshop. It was taken just before sunrise at Wilmington SA. I woke up at about 6am so it was a great rush to get my gear together, jump a couple of fences and capture this amazing sunrise. The complete sphere of the sky was ablaze with colour, the only way I could think of to do it justice was to take a panorama, as the light was constantly changing I quickly set up my tripod and took these 6 images in portrait mode as quickly as possible. This would have to be the most spectacular sunrise I have see. The full size image is about 75 mega-pixels.

Sturt’s Desert Pea, Swainsona formosa, the floral emblem of South Australia. I took this photo while on a recent outback trip researching a photography book I am working on for John Flynn’s 100th anniversary of the Australian Inland Mission. It was the first time I had actually seen a Sturt’s Desert Pea. We were not far from Broken Hill’s Sculpture Symposium when we spotted hundreds of flowering Desert Peas, the light was a bit harsh but I was pleased with this exposure after a quick edit in Lightroom.

This is a HDR image of St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne, I placed my camera on the floor on a small tripod and took 3 photographs -2, 0 and +2 stops. The images were loaded into Lightroom and a virtual copy was made of the under exposed image, the exposure was then dropped on this image a further 2 stops and the 4 images were loaded into Photomatix. They were then processed into one image and edited in Photoshop where I added the dark figure which was an image of my son dressed in a black hooded gown.

I don’t consider myself to be a portrait photographer, but I find the easiest way to get a natural smile out of a subject is to try and distract their attention away from the camera and to you. This can take a bit of effort as the camera is normally between you and them. I had taken a number of shots of my son and it was not until I gave him his dog to hold that I could manage to catch his natural smile.